


I come round back to you

by stillmadaboutpetra



Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bardic Magic, Brief mention of miscarriage, Fae & Fairies, Fae Jaskier | Dandelion, Fairy Tale Elements, Fate & Destiny, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Identity Reveal, Idiots in Love, Jaskier | Dandelion Loves Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, Kinda, M/M, Non-Human Jaskier | Dandelion, Not Actually Unrequited Love, POV Jaskier | Dandelion, Podfic Available, Podfic Length: 1.5-2 Hours, Red String of Fate, Unrequited Love, brief mention of rape, follows the timeline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-16
Updated: 2020-05-16
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:20:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24220459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stillmadaboutpetra/pseuds/stillmadaboutpetra
Summary: He is fifty and there is a man in the corner of a tavern in Posada who hasn’t moved save for the rise and fall of his tankard to his sculpted lips. Julian knows what he is before he knows to know. He should have started chasing monsters sooner.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg
Comments: 157
Kudos: 1319





	I come round back to you

**Author's Note:**

> Wrote this in one day start to finish. Sat on it nervously for awhile. Had to be rid of it.
> 
> NOW with a podfic!: thank you to Hsu!

Julian Alfred Pankratz has always been gifted. He remembers this about himself before he remembers most things. His mother swears to the goddess herself that Julian didn’t cry as a babe, he sang; his burbling was melodious; his hiccups as rhythmic as a drum.

He remembers making grass whistle between his thumbs, shrill and fluttering as he blew and blew until his father’s hunting dogs bailed at the sky and ran around him in circles. He could make any bowl or glass sing until it rattled by running a wet finger round and round the rim. He was very special, after all.

He would mimic the birds in the morning, becoming so deft at their chirps and tunes that he’d hide outside his mother’s window at odd hours of the day and drive her mad until he gave himself away with giggles and then she would bend over the sill and pull him in, his feet catching the lavender in her window boxes and he’d smell like a bouquet when she kissed his hair.

“My sweet songbird,” she would call him, kissing his pink cheeks, always marveling that no matter how her boy played in the dirt, he smelled like honeysuckle.

His mother loved him. This he remembers before he remembers anything. His mother loved him before he knew what it was to be. She sang him lullabies and diddies. She hung up the wash, singing as she pinned the sheets to the line even though they had a maid to do that.

“Sing them dry, my sweet songbird,” and so he would, the wind whipping the sheets like shipwreck sails as he sang with soap bubbles in the air.

When he is eight, he bursts with song so powerful that the lake ripples, a wave that rolls from one end to the other, hits the muddy shore and rolls back to him to lick and dissolve at his feet. He can’t do it again, although he tries all day, comes home teary-eyed and hoarse. He tells his mother but she doesn’t believe him.

When he is nine, sits his mother at one end of the long feasting table that his father only uses when other nobles come over. She indulges him as he lines eight wine goblets, expensive blown glass. She thinks he’s going to play his harmoics again. It’s a favorite show. He can replicate whole songs if he gets his hands on enough glasses. His mother tells his father Julian is gifted. His father does not see this as special.

He taps each glass with his tuning fork. It’s a scale. Up up up each glass goes. His mother is very far away from them. He is not. He forgets himself and stands behind the glasses like a stagemen presenting a show. Should have worn a cape. He opens his mouth and sings. Up up up, he runs the notes, loud; louder than the door slamming; louder than horse hooves at a full gallop; louder than the squall of a rabbit in the night; louder than thunder. More than thunder. The goblets shatter one after the other as he runs up a scale, holding each note long enough that the structure vibrates and explodes.

His mother is crying. He remembers this. Her hands are over her ears, her face turned away from the shatter. She runs to him, face a richtor of fear, mouth an open wail - but she falls quiet when her hands can’t find any glass on him, not even in his hair. It’s everywhere but him, shards lodged as far as the wall. Julian stands in a perfect circle glass.

He doesn’t remember this. His mother does. She lifts him out of the shattered prisms, and sweeps her foot across the circle, crushing the glass to powder that vanishes under footfall and through open windows. He does not do the glass trick again.

When he is ten, he is angry all the time. His father hits him. His mother is not allowed to call him songbird anymore. He is ten singing into a storm when his voice turns turns to screaming. Lightning strikes his favorite climbing tree and splits it in two and catches fire. The rain puts it out. Julian climbs into the hollow of wood, charred and hot under his hands despite the rain. He fits snugly inside and falls asleep. He does not even catch a sniffle despite his mother finding him the next day, wet and cold.

When he is eleven, the stableboy sees when his favorite horse catches its hoof in a hole and breaks its ankle. Julian makes him promise not to tell anyone. He worries his father will kill it just to be cruel. It’s gelded and useless otherwise. Julian sings to it all night between his weeping over sugar cubes. In the morning, its ankle is fine. Julian convinces the stableboy it was only sore, not broken. He doesn’t remember why, but he remembers phrasing it oddly. He thinks he rhymed.

(It’s not only prophecies that rhyme.)

When he is twelve, his father hits his mother. Julian cries. He cries and cries and cries, each wail louder than the next. His mother and father both cover their ears. With naught else to do, his father marches across the room and hits him once, sharp across the cheek, splitting his lip. Julian swallows his own blood. He stops crying. HIs father, who sometimes loves him but never knew how to love a child, gets on his knees and tells him if he doesn’t stop singing, he’ll send Julian’s mother far away. He remembers how he says “your mother” and not “my wife.” Julian swallows his own blood. He stops singing.

When he is thirteen, he loses his voice. Truly loses it. He cannot even speak. His mother pets his hair and feeds him honey tea. His body hurts all the time. His bones hurt. She tells him its puberty. She tells him it’s growing. He thinks: this is why trees creek and wood splits. When he doesn’t sleep for three days straight and finally falls asleep, unable to be awoken for a week, she takes him to a small cottage. She hands him a lute and brings in a tutor. Later he will let himself know this as odd.

He passes two years in her little cottage, her own from her side of the family, with his mother and the tutor. Julian loves the lute. He cannot sing, but he makes it sing for him. He learns the harp next, hugging himself around its massive shape. He gets a lyre and runs about in fields that always seem in bloom with flowers wherever he lays his head and plays lazy songs.

He remembers when the tutor kissed his mother. Julian didn’t mind this. She had looked happy.

When he’s fifteen, he wakes up soaked in the spend of his nightly pleasures and groans his sticky discomfort. It is the first noise he’s made in two years. Hesitantly, he hums. Then he sighs. Then he whispers to himself, _please_. Then he sings. His voice is low, rich, slow honey in his chest. It fills him up like warm bread. It rises in him. He sings low low low as low as he can, lower than the loosest note he can play on his lute, when the string can barely vibrate its peg so unwound. Then, he lifts his voice up up up until his molars ache.

His mother sends him to Oxenfurt when he is sixteen. His father does not talk to him. Julian does not mind this. He is going to study music and poetry and learn every instrument in the world. Everyone will love him.

He joins two choirs, an opera, a fraternity, a string quartet.

His first week, a group of older boys beat him bloody when he’s walking to his dorms one night. He doesn’t even have a chance to open his mouth and call out; they shove a wad of cloth into it and make very sure to hit him in the stomach and chest so he can’t catch his breath. It scares him as much as it hurts, swallowing his own blood, gasping for help, dumbed by the reality that he’ll not know if they’re beside him in class a day a week a year from now, ugly on the inside.

The headmaster looks into it, but Julian is new and can’t recall any faces from the night. He doesn’t leave his room for days. He doesn’t sing. He plays his lute and tells himself he’s too old to wish he were home again with his mother. He’s come to favor the lute over the lyre. The strap makes it easier to carry. He sees illustrations of bards in his books, the history-worn roughened type that follow knights, that carry swords themselves.

He is sixteen when he sees one in real life, at an inn on the edge of the city. The man has commandeered a table, makes a show of chugging a tankard of beer snatched from one of the amused patrons. He slams it down on the table, launches from his stage, striking a palm on the hollow back of his lute and beating his thumb into a drumming rhythm before his fingers even start plucking the strings.

He starts singing again, but not so overbearingly. He starts composing.

He is seventeen when he wins the Oxenfurt Warbler Competition in the baritone, tenor, and even alto divisions. He almost swallows glass that night at the celebrary party. He remembers this. He remember the cut of it on his tongue, the panic. Pressing it up into his palate to stop it from rolling down his throat before he can spit wine onto the table, blood a bare glint in his wine-blue pain. He is seventeen when he starts carrying a knife and stops letting people buy him drinks.

He is eighteen when he starts learning how to fuck. He harmonises with girls in choir. A well-timed wink is as useful as a well-metered couplet. A wink and a couplet? Unbeatable. He is eighteen when he leaves a sonnet in the pages of his classmate’s composition book. He sucks cock for the first time and doesn’t mind that the boy claimed the sonnet was his in class the next day, Julian’s throat too wrecked to protest.

He is twenty and a rake, a prodigy, a graduate of the Arts. Oxenfurt puts him up in a small house in town in exchange for a his labour. For his craft. He composes songs and writes poems. He and a few others from his year travel briefly, put up in nice homes, kept boys for the rich and bored and vaguely cultured. He writes complex narrations on the behavior of politics that bore him, on the justice amongst soldiers he’s never met. He loves muse after muse. He publishes love poems, professionally longing and lusting.

He is twenty one and takes his mother to a royal wedding to see him perform. His father is there. They do not speak.

He is twenty-two and teaches composition classes on the bardic tradition. A student, silly as it is being only a few years younger than Julian himself, confesses his love to Julian; he uses lines from one of Julian’s own poems. Love has never sounded more foolish.

He is twenty three when he finds a leather bound book deep in the bowels of Oxenfurt’s library. The vellum is yellow and butter soft under his fingers. It must be at least one hundred pages of sheet music. Julian stands among the books and the dust and the hush, thumbing through the pages, squinting at the impossibly small bars, realizing its one unending composition. It’s written for a string instrunent and vocal accompaniment, as far as he can tell, in what he thinks is Elder, although the print’s small, the tail of the notes smeared, the key signature a fucking nightmare. He is a professor; he pockets the booklet, black leather hot like its been laying under a sunbeam burning a hole in the pocket of his doublet as he slips from the library feeling very much like he’s gotten away with something but doesn’t yet know what.

He is twenty three and his neck hurts. His fingertips are flayed from strumming and plucking. When his mother visits him, he is thinned by effort. He can only play the first three pages. They take him almost an hour of unbroken performance in his slow trudge through a miasmic thornbush of notes and sliding scales. He’s read the lyrics and can pronounce them. He started a translation but gave up. As far as he can tell, the whole thing is a very dull very detailed narration of a boy picking flowers to bring home to his mother. The words give him a headache.

He is twenty four and rips the pages of the book out, hanging them side by side. He papers the walls of his little bedroom with them and so has to stand and walk in circles, eyes burning in their sockets with strain. He plays twenty pages, which take him from one end of his bedroom wall to the other end. The string of his first course snaps on him. When he looks down, his fingers have split and blood flecks the wall.

He is twenty five and his mother is sick. He lays down the letter she’s written and forgets, curls away from the message like the broken wax of the seal. He can play half of the song. He needs a second lute because a string will invariably snap somewhere around the twentieth page.

He is twenty six and his mother is still sick. He hasn’t left Oxenfurt in a year, hasn’t done much other than play in his home and teach classes as the school demands it. His students don't confess to him anymore. He doesn’t compose. When the Art’s Master had questioned his seeming lack of _composure_ and _dedication_ , Julian had dragged the man into his bedroom and showed him the music.

“This! I am working. Do you see this? This not dedicated enough?” And Julian had stabbed a raw finger at a page, incandescent with insult. The Art’s Master swore he couldn't read the music nor the lyrics but said something about those truly gifted in the arts being cursed in their arcane greatness and left, shaken but assured that their prodigy student was onto something immense if incomprehensible. Julian kept his funding but hardly cared. The sponsorship was nothing but a means to an end.

He is twenty six and his mother is sick and Julian has not gone home. His old tutor arrives to fetch him, shamefacing Julian. His mother is living at the cottage.

“My songbird,” she weeps when Julian kneels at her side. He looks dreadful but so does she. Still, her boy smells like honeysuckles, sweet as nectar. He holds her hands, confused. She is young. This should not be so. He can barely feel her skin beneath his callouses. He sings her a lullaby and can’t remember a word of it. He can’t remember what tongue either. She sleeps for two days straight. He thinks he sang for two days straight too.

When he leaves her, she’s full of color again, singing to her laundry. His old tutor squeezes his hand and thanks him, holds his gaze too long, a secret buried in his bright eyes, tells him to come home more to see his mother. Julian can’t think of why. He’s an awful son. He closes himself in his paper-lined bedroom back in Oxenfurt. He plants lavender in a window box, only remembers to water it once; sees its crumbling form after three months of neglects. Drowns it in water until the roots gurgle. It might survive. It could have, maybe. He tosses the box from his window, guilty.

He is twenty seven. It takes eight lutes last time he played it through. Hats where his funding goes. Not to food or wine but to strings and lutes. He brings ten to the stage. It takes twenty four hours on the dot to play and sing from beginning to end. It is the grandest most preposterous performance the Continent has ever seen. Julian Alfred Pankratz. What a pompous ass, performing for twenty four hours straight. Oh, but they come, they come like a housefire or a hanging or the butchering of a crown bull. Gore before glory. The town of Oxenfurt floods with people. His mother and father sit side by side in the front of the theatre. His father does not talk to him, but people talk to his father about Julian. The profit from tickets funds the entire Arts program for a single year. The Art’s Master who kept Julian under Oxenfurt’s title sighs with relief. People assume he’s composed the piece. Julian doesn’t say otherwise. It doesn’t feel like a lie. The only note of identification had been a small elaborate M on the very first page.

A little boy walks through a field and plucks every single flower he sees. Hyacinth and zinia and rose and daffodil and honeysuckles and aconite and bleeding hearts and mums and crocus and daisy and iris and hyssop and orchids and marigolds and moonflowers and morning glories and violets and primrose and pansies and...and...and.

And the little boy brings them to his mother. Hyacinth and zinnia and rose and daffodil and honeysuckles and aconite and bleeding hearts and mums and crocus and daisy and iris and hyssop and orchids and marigolds and moonflowers and morning glories and violets and primrose and pansies and...and...and

He picks every flower in the world until the bees have no more. He picks and picks until the fields are flat and green.

He climbs in the trees and picks all the blossoms. Dogwood and apples and magnolias holly and chaste and ashe and indigo and walnut and....and….and. He picks until the bees have no more. And the little boy brings them to his mother. Dogwood and apples and magnolias holly and chaste and ashe and indigo and walnut and...and...and. Then the forests are tall and green.

He cries because he has nothing to give to his mother. But she is more clever than anyone and her little boy so loves to pick sweet flowers. So she makes him a gift and draws the silk of the sky and the promise of clouds and whispers them into a hundred seeds and a hundred more and a hundred more after that and holds them out, lighter than feathers, sighs a secret song into each.

Bring me every blossom you see bloom my sweet boy. And she blows. And covers the whole world with yellow, a golden promise. Try as he might, the little boy can not pluck them all. Oh but you must, my sweet. See how the wind blows? There they go, a hundred and a hundred more. So he goes, chasing them on the wings of zephyr. When he turns his back, his clever mother plants all the flowers and all the blossoms. And on and on her boy goes, pulling yellow weeds that never end, his skin bitter with dandelion milk while the world blooms in the wake of his shadow.

He is twenty seven and cannot hear over the applause. Of a thousand people, only one hundred and fifty seven did not nod off. Four hundred and sixty left before the thirteenth hour. Ten thousand people claim to have been there. Zero remember any of the words or even the melody. Julain’s fingers bleed but not until the last hour. It took all ten lutes, a string of each snapped. He does not speak for a month after. He does not need to speak. Could not. It doesn’t scare him this time. He packs the sheet music away. A once and a lifetime concert.

He is twenty eight he is twenty nine he is thirty.

He is thirty one and someone remarks that he barely looks more than twenty five. He says he’s blessed with a comely face among other gifts. Some people just have all the luck.

He is thirty two and fatherless and the heir of an estate he does not want. He does not want for wealth. His mother returns to the main house. She’s not sick anymore. She frowns more, when she sees him. She is beautiful for her age. His old tutor looks the same as ever, handsome fellow.

He is thirty-three and buries himself between every pair of thighs he meets. He drinks until he’s blind drunk and wakes up not nearly hung over enough.

He is thirty seven and in a bar when a boy barely old enough to be a young man flirts with him. Julian plays coy, amused, not disinterested, and asks if the young man might be a new student at Oxenfurt. He can see the pin on the lads hat. The young man takes notice of his class ring and laughs shyly, asks when Julian graduated - was it last year?

“If only, dear one. To be twenty again, the whole wide world before me!”

“You speak as if youth is lost to you.”

“I’ll be mourning my fourth decade from it soon enough,” Julian sighs, hand to his tender heart.

The young man gives him an odd look. Feeling wrong footed and a touch embarrassed, Julian introduces himself as Professor Pankratz. The boy laughs in his face.

“If you’re going to pretend to be someone as famous as Julian Alfred Pankratz, don’t do so to an aspiring Artist.”

“Oh, little artist, and what makes you so sure you’re not speaking with the very same legend of the Endless Concert right this instant?”

Julian remembers this night.

“Because that man is almost forty and you,” an appraising look, “look scarecly older than I.”

He takes the young man home to his house paid for by Oxenfurt and fucks him over a desk littered with dull poems he’s written about nothing of great import. Afterwards, he lets the scamp fingerwalk his way through Julian’s collections, touch his lutes and lyres and harps and pipes and flutes, his books and his harmonics and his histories, his letters from his favorite Countess and the College that are dressed to Professor Julian Alfred Pankratz.

“The music must keep you young,” is the joke the lad makes but he doesn’t stay for another round even when Julian waters down wine for him and says this time, he can fuck Julian.

He is thirty eight when he takes a sabbatical. He grows a beard. It takes the whole year.

He is thirty-nine and uses white ash paste in his hair. People look at him less oddly. Barely. He wants to slip into their peripheral, hover at the fringe of his own life.

He is forty and his mother is forgetting things. His old tutor is there, the same as always, steadfast.

“How long have you loved my mother,” Julian asks.

“Not nearly long enough.”

He can’t remember this, if his old tutor always looked like this. If it ever occurred to him that neither his father nor his mother have blue eyes and blonde hair.

“My sweet boy,” she calls to him. She kisses him. “My songbird.” She runs her hands through his hair and kisses the crown of his head. “You smell like a wild meadow.”

“It’s lavender oil, like you’ve always liked,” he says, kissing the back of her hands.

“No,” she sniffs him again. “You used to smell like honeysuckle.”

He remembers this. She said he was sweet for it. He would play in the thick of it, pollen dusted, plucking the stamen from the flower to lick that pinprick of wild nectar.

She laughs. “You smell like dandelions, songbird.” Sharp. Bitter.

He is forty and he stares at himself in the mirror. Someone out of boyhood stares back. When. When is this face. He wants to pretend he doesn’t know, but he does. The only thing that’s kept up with him are his hands. His nails don’t grow past the callous-blunt tips of his fingers. He’s lost the whirling pattern on the pads of his fingers. The side of his thumb is stiff and shiny with a pink keloid.

The book’s in his luggage, buried in his clothes. It’s hot to the touch, sunbeam warm. He buys his mother every flower in the market that day. There aren’t enough vases, so he drinks a bottle of wine to make another. It shouldn’t break, but he taps a tuning fork on it and sings, grim eyed in his expectation. It breaks. He cleans the glass, wonders at a shard he could swallow, small as a seed, Sharp with as much potential.

He is forty-five and buys every flower in the market for his mother’s funeral. He is forty-five and pays a mage to dye his hair brown with a spell.

He is forty-five. He is the most famous musician to have ever performed. He buys his house from Oxenfurt and buries his wealth of coin beneath the floorboards along with a book of music belonging to no one. He buries it beneath dirt and then nails down the floor. He signs the deed of ownership over to the son he’ll never bear, Jaskier Alfred Pankratz. He entrusts this to the Art’s Master for safe keeping via letter, sealed with his personal insignia. There is a painting of him hung in their walls, commissioned after the Endless aconcert. Should he ever need it, well, no one could look at him and think him not who he claims. Identical, they’ll gasp, when Jaskier appears. Perhaps he will be his own grandson. Or his great grandson. One day, a Pankratz will walk through those doors. Surely, one day.

He is forty-eight and full of bad habits. He cannot shake his love of courts. He plays as Jaskier, a weed of a man. He plays for his bed and breakfast. It’s not so different, really, than what he did before.

He plays in the center of the Cidaris market, songs he wrote a long time ago. Songs of shipwrecked men coming home, of honorable wives and weeping daughters and steadfast sons. He sings nonsense tunes, tongue in cheek. A noblewoman with a maid holding the back of her dress and two armored guards abreast each side, invites him to play for her that night.

He takes her to bed, though she appears more than twice his age. He vows to show her every pleasure and surprises her, a wicked young thing. He looks at her body, the soft sag of it, pulled by longing. This should be him.

“I saw your father play his Endless Concert,” she says afterwards, running her fingers through Julian’s hair. “They say they never cleaned his blood from the stage floor. That it took a hundred lutes. That the strings snapped and hit the first row of guests and lashed them blind.”

He laughs. “They say many things.”

“Ten thousand people went.”

“One thousand. Half didn’t make it through the bloody thing.”

“Can’t remember a single bit of the song.”

“No one can.”

“You were very good.”

“Thank you.”

She smiles knowingly. She does not stop him from leaving but lets him kiss her all the same. He doesn’t go back to Cidaris for years.

He is forty-nine and freezing. He remembers this. He is roguish and clever. He is a wandering bard. He has been carrying a knife for thirty-two years and for the first time tonight, he stabbed someone with it. He is naked and freezing and face first in frost-stiff grass, the weight of three men atop him, indignant with his rage and his weakness. He hides his hands beneath his body to spare them the stamp of boots. He knows the most valuable part of his body. He swallows his own blood.

“You gonna sing, pretty bard?” It’s pathetic and predictable and he should have seen it coming and his heartbeat rattles his bones in its breaking.

He is a boy sleeping in the charred hollow of a lightning strike. His mother always told him his crying sounded like singing. He isn’t sure which he does, only that his voice is high and urgent and he thinks its a song that no one can remember, no one of a thousand and one people. But the blood in his mouth burns his tongue and the hands on his skin blister and Julian doesn’t stop to watch the frost melt from the print of his feet as he takes off running, nothing to him but a signet ring left on his calloused finger. He runs back into Leyda, into the inn he’s been playing. They are good folk and bundle him by the fire and run into the night with torches and wood axes and a farmer avenges a bard and he makes it into a song so that everyone knows that it is the common man and the common axe that keeps justice in Leyda. Beware.

He’s fifty when he visits a retired professor in Ban Glean. He says, “My apologies, sir, for calling upon you with no notice. I am Jaskier, my father-”

“Is Julian Alfred Pankratz, yes, boy, you are the spitting image of him.” He is welcomed in and given new clothes and care. He listens to the professor tell stories about Julian, about his father, himself, as an impetuous student, a troublemaker and a pain in the ass in theater.

“He would not stop auditioning for the girls’ parts. We all thought his balls hadn’t dropped, the falsetto he had.”

He lingers in luxury, teaches the church choir just long enough to buy a new lute.

He is fifty and being booed. He is but a humble bard, and this unwashed rabble his adoring audience. He has learned hunger pains again and takes their bread, thank you very much. He spent years transcribing the woes of battles and the rise and fall of kingdoms into epics but never lived them. He wrote of great love but never felt it. He takes a turn writing of village girls and midwife abortions and drakes eating sheep. It just reminds people of how hard winter will be and the children they couldn’t save.

He is fifty and there is a man in the corner of a tavern in Posada who hasn’t moved save for the rise and fall of his tankard to his sculpted lips. Julian knows what he is before he knows to know. He should have started chasing monsters sooner.

“They don’t exist.”

Julian wouldn’t know. That’s the thing.

“I know who you are.”

The year after the Endless Concert, there was a slaughtering in Blaviken. Julian knows because he wrote a song about it. About lawless justice and that it matters not who drew first blood but who first lays down his weapon. This is before he knew what it felt like to stab a man and to run for his life with blood hot in his mouth. Before he praised a farmer who killed his rapist. Surely a Witcher knew the lines of justice.

Destiny knocks the wind out of him. Julian hits the dusty road with a wheeze. He can’t blame the Witcher, can he? Butcher. A thousand and one people cannot remember a single note of a song that lasted twenty four hours. Every year, a thousand more claim to have been there. He’s learned not to trust people who claim to have been there. The only one who can tell the story of Blaviken is walking away from him.

“He’s just a bard,” the Witcher snarls as Julian curls around the kick from the elf. And so they beat the Witcher; Julian feels their blows through the bow of Geralt’s body as its weight rocks him where they’re bound together. Julian has a mouth full of blood. Death and destiny. Heroics and heartbreak. Geralt was right; it is onion.

Julian is fifty and should know better than to trust the stories that others tell, who swore they were there. There are too many songs about elves sung by humans and none by elves.

“One human. And you can let him go.”

Julian stares at a cave wall, this golden palace, and opens his mouth to say: “I’m not sure I am human.” He doesn’t. He swallows the blood in his mouth. Geralt speaks of a lesser evil. At the end of the day, yes, the Witcher knows something of justice and the weight of choosing. “Bloody, and hating yourself.”

Would the farmers hate themselves if they dug deep enough to find small bones. Would they, could they, lay them out and find the place where their own children differed? Would they bury them again and sing the same songs that they always sang? Songs Julian wrote and wishes he hadn’t and cannot take away.

Julian says “reborn” between the splinter of Dol Blathanna mountains. An elven lute that hums under his fingers hangs from his strap.

“Will the elf king heed/ what the witcher entreets? Is history a wheel/ doomed to repeat?”

Maybe another day. Respect doesn’t make history. Julian knows this. He’s sung a hundred songs of lies. He has looked past the maimed soldiers that come home to farms they cannot tend with one arm, and sings about glory. Seen them sing songs of themselves over pints poured in pity, clutching to rhymes for reason.

Geralt rides all the way back to Posada without learning Julian’s name. They return without the head of the Sylvan. Julian has the entire song composed before they enter the tavern; Geralt doesn’t ask for the other half of his payment, promising that the deed has been done but having no head for proof, cannot expect more.

He doesn’t stay to hear Julian play the song.

Julian is fifty-one when he meets Geralt again.

“Geralt!”

“Not you, bard,” Geralt sighs. He’s standing outside a Rivian whorehouse, shirt in one hand, breeches unlaced and clinging to the violent cut of his hips. Julian’s cock kicks in his pants at the sight.

“What a lovely surprise this is. Oh-ho! Hello, Marta, true temptress of my heart,” Julian greets the madame of the house, kissing her many-ringed finger. “Throwing my fair-haired Witcher onto the streets before his cock is back in his pants?”

“Jaskier, darling boy. Your friend’s cock can’t afford my house anymore.”

Geralt grunts in his throat, turning away from them. Julian spins on a heel and loops his arm through Geralt’s elbow. He’s on the ground a second later, Geralt’s twin-torched gaze sneering at him.

“Well with manners like that it’s a wonder you’re not given a curtousy fuck!” Julian huffs. He sits up, eye level with the fact that Geralt’s still rock hard in his pants, the length of him a blunt weapon barely sheathed down his thigh. Geralt adjusts himself pointedly staring at Julian, an eyebrow cocked threateningly his way.

“A boy like you must only know courtesy and pity fucks, hmm?” The Witcher leers, shifting just so that his hips face Julian and the smell of him is there, a sharp and bitter tang Julian can taste in the air as he sucks a gasp in through his mouth. He swallows the smell of him. They stay like that a minute, outside of a Rivian whorehouse, Julian inexplicably on his knees before the Witcher, the night passing around them. Nothing happens. Geralt shakes himself and gives Julian a tense look, seemingly disquieted by his own words. He grunts and tromps away, pulling his shirt on over his head, muttering something about bards and boys and morons.

It’s not Julian’s fault that they’re staying at the same inn. It’s not his fault that Geralt brings in the head of water hag from a Jaruga spillway that the town draws its water from. The twisted body is strung up with his horse, smelling of fetid water.

Julian sets his calloused finger to his lute, tucks himself quietly in the seat across from Geralt. Geralt glares at him, then turns his face to his drink, the smell of him long gone from Julian’s tongue, only remembered.

There is but one well/ from where to fetch our water  
I have no son/ just I and my daughter  
She has such long hair/ i see it in the breeze  
It touches the floor/ when she prays on her knees  
Come back soon/ i always call to her  
I love her so/ my only daughter  
Her feet are soft/ each morning she goes  
The grass is cool/ the sun not yet rose  
There is but one well/ from where to fetch our water  
I have no son/ just I and my daughter  
The morning strains/ the sky grows dim  
I pray on my knees/ beg ye forgive my sin  
Take not her/ my only daughter  
She only wished/ to fetch me water

The room quiets. Julian doesn’t look up, just strums and hums. He loosens the peg on his first course, then the rest. Checks the pitch.

“The call of the White Wolf/ is loudest at dawn”

He doesn’t get into the second line before the alderman comes through the front door, making for Geralt. Julian turns his head to see the slow tear of Geralt’s eyes from him as he regards the alderman.

“Witcher!”

Six. Six people had been dragged into the water. Julian heard about it his first night. Marta, the mistress of the brothel in town, told him so over wine while he sang her a diddy about a cunt that keeps the lads coming back. That’s why he stayed. Because eventually, Geralt of Rivia would find his way here. Julian spent a year lurking after monsters until the monster-slayer would pass his path once more.

“I have your hag.”

The alderman nods, assessing.

“We thank you.”

Geralt smiles tightly. “I will be thanked with fifty guldeon, as promised.”

A pregnant still hovers in the tavern. Julian strums his lute idly, then leans his head back, voice soft and clear as a church bell.

There is but one well/ from where to fetch our water  
I have no son/ just I and my daughter

“Oi, pay him, Otam, you miser,” someone shouts. The tavern seems to swell and rupture, come back to itself abruptly. Cups click, people start to chew and bicker and curse again. Geralt pockets his coin with a small nod to the alderman. Julian trips his fingers over the strings of his lute, leaps to his feet with a wink at Geralt. The Witcher’s stony face would make a mother weep.

“When a humble bard, dared to ride along,” Julian croons, swaggering through the tavern with a swing of his hips. “With Geralt of Rivia, along came this song.”

The bonneted barmaid drops a pitcher of beer on their table and a plate of fried frogs. Julian cannot feel the burn of the still popping oil on his fingertips. Geralt watches Julian fuss about the small bones: “You know a man could rip a vocal chord on these sharp little bits, have you ever thought of that? Likely not, Geralt, you seem content to grumble your way through Common Speech.”

The Witcher bites a frog in half, a pop of hot steaming guts dribbling over his fingers. He chews the thing, bones and cartilage and all. Swallows without looking away from Julian.

“You are charming,” Julian admires, laughing a little. Geralt hums. He drinks most of the beer they were gifted and doesn’t say thank you or sorry or anything at all. But he lets Julian have the last frog - not that he hadn’t eaten most of them anyway.

“Where are you off to next, Witcher?” Julian asks, buying them a second pitcher.

“Back to fuck my way through that whorehouse. I have enough coin for a courtesy fuck and a pity fuck.”

Julian thinks it’s a joke despite the lack of inflection and facial expression. He smiles like it is and licks grease from the inside of his wrist and up his thumb.

“Lovely. Marta has some lovely girls.” After a beat. “Two lads too.”

“Boys annoy me. They take too long and talk too much and aren’t worth the effort.” Geralt looks him in the eye when he says this. Julian smiles like it’s a joke. He knows it isn’t.

“And after the whores?”

Geralt sighs and sits back, hands folded in his lap, assessing. Julian is used to this. What is the gaze of one Witcher compared to a thousand shapeless spectators? “I’ll follow the river. There will be more hags, or drowners, or a kikimora who has developed a taste for watering cattle and girls fetching water.”

“Delightful,” Julian declares, drumming his hands on the sticky tabletop. “Shall we leave tomorrow, then? I’ll pick you up from the street, tuck your cock back in your pants, and be on our way.”

The smile that twitches in the corner of Geralt’s mouth is an applause. He shakes his head and leaves Julian and his lute at the tavern, crossing the street to the brothel. In the morning, when he goes to find Roach biting at Julian’s fingers as the bard insists on trying to stroke her cheek, he snaps his leather hair tie over the back of Julian’s hand.

“Don’t touch Roach.”

Julian kisses the red slash of pain. Geralt ties his hair back from his face. He doesn’t say leave. He’ll let the bard tire himself out following the fantasy he’s spun in his pretty empty head and Geralt will drop him off at the next town when he cries about his sore feet and hungry belly and the blood and guts and glares.

He is fifty three when someone first calls Geralt _Butcher_ with venom in their voice and Julian there to hear it. He is fifty three the first time he watches Geralt flinch as one stone, then two, then ten are cast at him. He does no more than place a hand on the back of his head as he walks out of the town. Geralt had killed the werewolf but not before it slid into the skin of the husband it had once been and left Geralt with a bloody sword and a dead man. Julian had held the new-made widow while she wailed, the kitchen table upturned, claw marks and fur and blood everywhere. She spat at Geralt’s face and cursed him and cursed Julian. Maybe her husband would not have killed her. Maybe he loved her still. The man had killed two girls in the woods. He was their school teacher. He was adored.

“Time to go, bard,” Geralt had said, cutting the hand that still wore claws from the dead man’s body. It went, black with blood, into a sack at Geralt’s hip. Julian follows him, sees the stone that burst a star of blood on Geralt’s knuckle where it might have been his head. They walk the mile out of town to the farmhouse, to the grieving parents who begged his aid.

They can’t pay him but they try. The unmothered wife makes him a bath and washes their clothes. The unfathered husband puts an edge on Geralt’s sword. They sleep on fresh hay in a warm stable loft, barn cats purring between their bodies, Roach eating her fill of oats below.

“How often does that happen?” Julian asks softly. Even in the dark, he can see Geralt’s eyes, slitted and glowing like the cats that prowl on the rafters and catch the moon in their gaze and mice in their mouths.

“Enough.”

He sings about werewolves and men who wear pelts that their wives wash with the bedsheets to rid of blood and secrets and semen. He sings about the True White Wolf, hunter of evil.

He is sixty and has known Geralt of Rivia for a decade. He leaves his side once a year with excuses about Countesses and the luxuries of court. Geralt, after the fifth year, starts to show up in the cities where Julian earns his keep. He has promised to change the world’s mind about Geralt, and he does so with each song. Jaskier Alfred Pankratz, son of the great Julian Alfred Pankratz, is a welcome voice among great halls. Julian has seen a lot, he thinks, and there are few things he believes in. Geralt is of that few. The man is the only honest thing in this world. Honest to his nature, unflinching in the face of it. Deserving of more.

He does not tell Geralt that he goes home to Lettenhove to lay flowers on his mother’s grave.

He is sixty when Geralt rides into Oxenfurt to fetch him, Julian’s plainfaced eagerness at the sight of him is enough to have him pulling Julian onto the back of Roach’s saddle, a little puzzled but buried beneath his grim nature, a little pleased to be treated with welcome and joy. He doesn’t recognize this in himself, not fully, not yet. It will be years before he can name himself _loved_ and circle the source back to a humble bard.

“Is this not your home, schoolboy,” Geralt asks. “Are you fleeing from a legion of disappointed lovers and cuckold spouses? Sucked off the wrong professor finally?” It has been a decade and Geralt still calls him boy, does not look at him suspiciously as Julian glows and glows and glows with youth, smooth-faced and clinging with the last winter of babyfat.

“My father died,” Julian blurts. Because that is why he is here. To tell the new Art’s Master that Julian Alfred Pankratz died this past winter. Julian bought his own grave, held his own funeral.

Geralt frowns, twisting in his saddle to stare at him. He doesn’t say I’m sorry because he’s terrible at this and humans die all the time. He remembers this whenever Jaskier sleeps soundly at his side under the stars and Geralt listens to his sure-beating heart. He says: “You never speak of your father. I assumed you orphaned or more often than not, a changeling child climbed from a nest.”

Julian’s breath catches in his throat.

That sure-beating heart races against his back. “Fuck,” Geralt says for an apology. “That was - thoughtless of me.”

Julian laughs, wet with tears. A changeling child. Oh, he is thick. He is the thickest of them all, isn’t he.

“I don’t speak of him, do I? You have no ear for music, it seemed pointless.” He rubs his face into Geralt’s shirt. Roach steps light and swaying through Oxenfurt.

“Julian Alfred Pankratz,” Geralt rumbles gently after too long, once Jaskier’s heart has settled its tempo. “I’m not completely daft. Even Vessmir in Kaer Mohren likes to claim he was at the Endless Concert. No way to prove it, if it true.”

How strange, to hear his name from Geralt’s lips. To hear it knowing that Geralt thinks this man and he father and son. How strange to invent your own legacy, beget yourself, become the memory of what you are as you become your own destiny.

“Come now, my dear friend, should you be of unparalleled strength and beauty and be cultured? That is too unfair an advantage you have against me. I’ll never be able to bed a woman with you at my side.”

“You can have the men. They like you well enough for the both of us, Jaskier.”

Geralt doesn’t mind that Jaskier looks at him the way he does. The way he always has since a night on his knees in Rivia that came to nothing but a sad song of drowning.

“Generous,” Julian says, resting his cheek on Geralt’s back, his black shirt as warm as leather in a sunbeam.

“You don’t wish to stay here, revel in his legacy?” Geralt asks him. The sun was low and Julian guided Geralt to the home he had in Oxenfurt. He put Roach up in a stable, bid her goodnight to follow Julian - Jaskier - to a narrow house.

Julian’s father died bitter and ill. Or, he thinks. Funny. A changeling child.

“Julian Alfred Pankratz,”Julian says, pouring them too much wine and sitting beside Geralt in his own bed, in a bedroom that had once held one hundred pages of music no one but he could read, “killed himself. There is not a legacy in that.”

Geralt leans back, drinks, waits. He has still lived more than twice as long as Julian and silence and patience is the best lesson he’s learned. “He isn’t my real father, either. I don’t know who is. My mother she- she had an affair. I suppose I am a changeling child, aren’t I?”

Geralt’s eyes flick across his face. He sits up, lays a heavy hand on Julian’s shoulder. It’s not lying, is it? He isn’t lying. No wonder the man he called father never loved him.

“Who our parents were, where our blood comes from, it does not matter. We become what we are ourselves, through the life we lead,” Geralt says in his even, smooth river-rock voice. He has learned the power of silence and the wisdom of rarely spoken words.

Julian is not drunk enough to be having a philosphical discussion about his own fake suicide and the sudden uncomfortable truth he cannot deny that he does not know who his father is, or what he is. He gulps down his wine and pours another full goblet. It kills the bottle. He opens another. Geralt taps his cup against Julian’s and raises it in a toast.

“Fuck heritage,” Geralt cheers quietly.

Julian Alfred Pankratz is dead. Long live Jaskier.

He is sixty and drunk and has killed himself and been reborn. Geralt’s arm is an improbable pillow under his head. There is a Witcher in his bed, in a room that still has blood on the walls. Geralt’s purring. Jaskier doesn’t know what else to call it. Geralt’s shitfaced, soft and warm and patient as Jaskier unbuttons his shirt, five hundred and one buttons it has.

“You’ll be disappointed to know, boy, that Witcher’s suffer the same unfortunate fate as any human man when they’re drunker than fuck.” Geralt does an admirable job of trying not to slur his words. He still does. Jaskier giggles into his armpit, tucking closer to him.

“No potion in your pouch to rouse to meet my mouth?” Jaskier taunts, shuffling up to rest his head beside Geralt’s and stare at the side of his face. Silver scruff marks his cheeks; it prickles against Jaskier’s lips when he leans in, a puff of warm air. He kisses Geralt’s cheek. Geralt’s breath leaves him in a woosh.

“You can try,” Geralt says very quietly. Jaskier lays there, rubbing his lips slowly against Geralt’s unshaved cheek to feel the scritch and scratch of it. Then he slimes his way down between his legs, pushing them open so he can lay between Geralt’s thighs. Like this, with Geralt’s shirt messily undone, he can see his diaphragm rise and fall in too-quick breaths, surprising Jaskier. Nerves? Impatience? Jaskier can’t help the flight of song that slips from him, just a sigh of scales, a sweet nothing. Geralt shudders as if Jaskier has slipped a finger into him, but he has yet to touch him at all.

“Jaskier,” Geralt says, a hand sudden and urgent in his hair. His Witcher stares at him, wild-eyed, flushed. Jaskier’s dick is hard and he presses it into Geralt’s leg. Geralt groans at the feel of him and sits up, hair loose and wild around his head, and pulls Jaskier to him to kiss him. Their teeth click on impact. Jaskier’s lip burst. He swallows his own blood and hums and shushes Geralt, who grows sweet and slow under his hands, droopy-eyed and drunk. He kisses so slick and lazy, sour-sweet with wine. Jaskier’s heart could break with how gently Geralt lays Jaskier down beside him.

“You’re too drunk to be propositioning me, boy,” Geralt chides, rolling Jaskier over in a rough show of strength that unhelpfully sends jaskier throbbing. “M’drunk. Too much so to say no.” He slots Jaskier against his chest, pats his face again, pausing a moment to admire that his hand covers Jaskier’s whole head. Geralt lets out a shaky breath and slides it to Jaskier’s stomach, stretching thumb and fingers wide to cover as much of him as possible. He pulls Jaskier tight against him with a grunt, a single push of his hips.

“Geralt,” Jaskier whispers into the dark because it is safe and this room has always kept his secrets.

“Hmm?”

“I want to travel with you forever.”

“Forever is not very long for some men,” Geralt murmurs with a squeeze to his hip. “Go to sleep, Jaskier. We’ll leave in the morning.”

Jaskier wakes thinking Geralt’s left him, alone in his bed in the room that once held a hundred pages. But his swords rest against the blood-speckled wall. Jaskier locks the front door and rips open a hatch in the floor. The leather of the book is hot. He shoves it in his bag and fills his purse with coins. He’s packed and waiting when Geralt returns, a lead of a rumor on something killing people in the mountains from a merchant come up from the south.

Jaskier buys a horse and they make good time like this.

Geralt says its an arachasae. Jaskier remarks that he hates spiders. Jaskier insists he follows Geralt as he tracks the spider monster along scrubland mountains. The air is dry and clean; the nights cold without clouds. They sleep with their bedrolls side by side, their blankets stretched between them. Geralt doesn’t give off as much heat as Jaskier wishes, his chemistry of a lower temperature. But it helps. He hides his hands beneath Geralt’s shirt, pressing cold skin and dull callouses into Geralt’s back. Geralt curses him up and down the mountain for it but lets him do it again the next night and the next. They don’t kiss.

Geralt drinks golden oriole, handing Jaskier the empty bottle. He goes pale and black-eyed and swells with lethal nature. He leaves Jaskier with the horses, following the trail of blood and venom burned into the ground. It’s not a mistake. Geralt tracks the arachasae to its nest, a dessicated goat in its web. He shoots it down with six arrows, tipped in a poison of his own. An arachasae bids him many gifts. He milks venom from its fangs, cuts the pincers from his face and wraps them in cloth to bring back and sell to the next alchemist he can find. He’d left Jaskier two miles back from where he thought he’d find the monster, and he’s another half a mile out from where he left Jaskier when his medallion hums against his chest. The air whines in his ear, at first unintelligible, the sound of a swarm of insects. As he speeds his descent down the cliffside, the hum grows fiercer, the silver hot over his heart.

He hears Jaskier singing - bits like Elder but not quite. It echoes up from the valley. Geralt can smell the toxic fumes of arachasae venom, still two hundred paces away. He runs the rest of the way, stopping short of a cloud of poison, the hiss of dissolving rock, the clicking chittering of mandibles and too many legs. Even at the distance it burns to breathe, the inside of his nostrils inflamed.

He almost yells for Jaskier. He can hear him singing. He doesn’t understand and cannot in that moment understand because four arachasae are hunting in a circle, practically crawling atop and over each other. Jaskier’s horse lay dead, half spun in a cocoon to be dragged back to another nest.

He empties the rest of his quiver into the first two before they start coming after him, pincers dripping with venom. One nick, tis not death. Nor two. Nor three. By the fifth gouge, the other two monsters are dead and Geralt vomits in the grass, stumbling towards the fading vapors. His mutagen blood pulses, pushing venom valiantly from his wounds. Jaskier is sitting on the ground, bowed over a booklet, lute in his lap, rocking and singing, Roach standing at his back.

It is she who throws her head back and whinnies, feet kicking in stress. Jaskier looks up, eyes a flash of seaglass and light. Geralt tries to swallow but ends up vomiting again, knees hitting the ground hard. His head spins and darkens as Jaskier rushes to catch him before he can fall face first into his own vomit.

There is a song in Geralt’s head. He cannot find its melody no matter how many times it loops around him. There is blood in his mouth; its not his own. He swallows it. There is golden oriole, sour lemon and an alkaline fuzziness that burns in his blood. The veins all along his arms and legs throb beneath his skin, flow black and too-fast and too-slow. His wounds ooze. The song never stops and it never starts. Jaskier is there, wiping his brow, lips moving. His touch is light, his fingertips rough.

When he wakes, Jaskier tells him he was out for two days fighting the poison. Geralt can smell his own foul stench, the sick on him. There are no arachasae corpses. It’s a new campsite. He dizzies to think Jaskier hauled him onto Roach’s back, took them somewhere new and safe. But that’s what happened, isn’t it.

“You’re heavier than you look and I thought you looked heavy as shit to begin with, Geralt,” Jaskier complains at him even as he sits Geralt up in his lap and feeds him the lip of the rapidly emptying water skin.

The fingers of Jaskier’s right hand are badly patched, blood clotted in the scrap cloth. Geralt tries to shake himself alert, only succeeds in making his head spin.

“Stop moving, would you, you ox. I spent two days keeping you from choking to death on your vomit, do not undo my hard work. It was a labor of love and I’ll not have your impatience spoil my efforts.”

“Jaskier,” Geralt tries, groping for his bloody hand. Jaskier trembles, exhausted, and sings softly until Geralt’s grip loosens and he falls asleep once more.

The next morning, Geralt finds himself quite well. The same cannot be said for his bard. He’s pale, dim-eyed. Geralt pinches the skin on the back of his hand and watches its stick to itself.

“Have you not had a drink in three days?” Geralt snaps, angry with Jaskier. With himself. A human, dying to keep a Witcher alive from the mistake of his own poor hunt. Fuck if he’ll live with that on his conscious. “Fuck.”

“Sixty isn’t a bad life,” Jaskier mumbles when Geralt packs him onto Roach. “It’s been a good life.”

“You’re not going to die, Jaskier,” Geralt promises gruffly, climbing onto Roach. She’s not in great shape either. But a horse is a horse and a man a man. “You’re barely out of your swaddling clothes.”

Jaskier laughs, dry and high. “Geralt, oh Geralt. Geralt, my garroter. Besotter. I want some...water.”

He aims them towards the trading post, searches the land for run off water, wants to beg the sky for rain. He will cut Roach’s artery and make Jaskier drink her blood. It will keep him alive another day more. Geralt will carry him the rest of the way. The air grows less thin as Roach picks her way downhill, spurred too fast by Geralt’s worry, the weight of two men on her back.

“I won’t die.”

He’d though Jaskier asleep. He’s awake now, head lolling on Geralt’s shoulder.

“You have no idea,” he husks, sibilant whisper crawling up Geralt’s neck, “how much I won’t die. I don’t die.”

Forever isn’t very long for most men, Geralt thinks bitterly. But Jaskier doesn’t die. He vomits bile and shakes and Geralt crowds the healer, trading him the arachasae venom for treatment. Within a day, Jaskier’s lucid again. In two, he’s talkative. By three, he’s annoying. By four, he declares himself fit as a fiddle, no pun intended. He’s waiting the fifth day by Roach, cooing to her and feeding her handfuls of grass and yellow weeds that he spent all morning tearing up from the soil while thin dew still clung to the green.

Geralt watches him laugh at Roach nuzzling and lipping his palm and looking firmly annoyed that there is no more food to be at with him.

“Geralt!” Jaskier grins, squinting into the sunlight, sweetcheeked, shirt already half undone as he sweats in the rising heat. Geralt crowds him against Roach’s side and dips his head to the crook of his neck, Jaskier’s improbbaly voracious body hair tickling his nose.

“Dandelions,” Geralt sighs, pushing his face into Jaskier’s skin. He’s bitter milkgrass. “In the middle of scrub land.”

“A hundred and a hundred more, all the seeds spread round this world,” Jaskier sighs, head falling back against Roach, body curving towards Geralt like he’s the sun to his new-bloomed life force. For just the barest moment, Geralt thinks his medallion flashes hot on his skin. But then he thinks, no, that’s just his heart aching with want.

Jaskier’s lips are waiting for him to kiss. His mouth is wet, wonderfully so. Geralt would starve to never leave these plush lips, that clever tongue. He would drown here if he could. Jaskier is a boy who he’s almost gotten killed too many times.  
He leaves him the first town they reach.

Jaskier is sixty-one when he finds Geralt again. Or, rather, he writes down about how Geralt got swallowed alive by a monster.

“Then, he died,” the poor man says feelingly. The people sigh in grief and terror and delight.

“He’s fine,” Jaskier sniffs, writing furiously. Something vicious and mean and glad leaps in him when Geralt walks through the door, drenched in guts. He does a good job not acting surprised to see Jaskier. Jaskier rouses the people into Geralt’s least favorite song.

It’s only half true, the bit about his sausage and royal pantries. Mostly, he wants to bring Geralt with him. He wants an excuse. Geralt menaces him with his scariest Scary Face from a bathtub Jaskier fills with good smelling salts and oils. Geralt must want the excuse too because he lets Jaskier dress him up, piece by piece.

Jaskier calls himself Geralt’s very best friend. Geralt calls him bard. But he holds still when Jaskier kisses him outside of the party in the shadow of a tapestry. He touches Jaskier just barely, fingers tangling with Jaskier’s, his sword calluses meeting Jaskier’s playing calluses. A cad and a coward, Geralt calls him, then smiles too fond and too dear afterwards and wishes him good luck.

It goes to shit pretty much immediately after. Geralt, in his usual style of stupidity, runs from Destiny. He happens to run from Jaskier that day too.

He is sixty two and finds Geralt again. He’s quite good at it. By now, people know who he is adjacent to Geralt. Jaskier Alfred Pankratz is a different kind of famous than Julian. Most people think he’s fucking Geralt of Rivia; he sings about the Witcher for the whole world to chorus it back to him. They’re right and wrong. “Seem to have misplaced my Witcher,” he tuts between towns until he finds the right whisper of his white wolf. His feet do the rest. He strikes out from town, singing a song of his hunt. He always seems to find his way back to him.

“How the fuck did you find me, bard,” Geralt snarls. He has Jaskier pinned at swordpoint to a tree.

“Really?” Jaskier bites. Geralt sneers, all teeth, grimacing, suspicious. Jaskier slaps the sword away; it’s too easy. Geralt lets him. “What bee got up your bonnet.”

Princess Cirilia Fiona Elen Riannon was born a few months ago, that’s what bee. Jaskier played at the feast. Then he got as far away from Cintra as possible, skin itching. Calanthe had looked at him too long, waiting for Geralt to materialize from beneath Jaskier’s poofy sleeves.

Geralt turns from him, then back, then away again, finally back, a finger raised to point stiffly at him. “You, you’re my bee.”

Jaskier lays a hand over his heart and simpers. “That is so sweet. Does that make you my flower? Or are you a bonnet? Betwitched my heart, my Witcher of white, wisteria tart, his eyes so bright--!”

Geralt shoves him like a child, standing over Jaskier. Jaskier kneels at his feet, wondering when he will grow weary of this. It is Rivia all over again. It is twelve years of push and pull and kisses that Geralt can’t take back.

“Really,” Jaskier demands. He spreads his arms wide, encompassing Geralt’s stupidity. “You’re going to shove me onto the ground and act like you aren’t happy to see me.”

“Yes,” Geralt replies cooly. Jaskier cocks his head, glancing up through his lashes. He has had the better part of a century to perfect his pout. Geralt growls in his throat, a wordsmith, a poet among paupers. He looks away from Jaskier. He does awful things to Jaskier’s heart when he does that, but it stings sweetly when Geralt always looks back. Geralt always looks back. Jaskier licks his lip and looks pathetic and Geralt sighs and helps him to his feet with a falsely resentful curse.

But Geralt hangs onto his fears and holds himself just out of reach, stiff and nervous. Jaskier leaves him be. They have years. They have forever.

He is sixty-six when he loses his voice again. He’d just found Geralt once more, fishing for a Djinn. Geralt’s haunted, flinching at everything. There is a little girl in a kingdom, guarded by a lioness. Geralt is the only true thing in this world, but he is not always as brave as he pretends. Jaskier is sixty-six and tries to sing and cannot, gasping for Geralt who doesn’t get it. And then, the roof is caving in. And then, he is watching Geralt kiss Yennefer of Vengerberg while he drives himself into her, calling her Yen, like he knows her, like she knows him. Chiredean doesn’t let him watch. He is sixty-six and hasn’t felt sick with love since his school days. He wonders if this is enough heart break to finally kill him. If his body insides has been withering away while his face doesn’t change a day.

He and Chiredean sit for what feels like hours.

“You love him,” the elf healer says, important and slow. He admires Jaskier’s lute, the elven make of it clear to his eyes. “Humans love so fiercely in their short lives, I hear. I think it’s why you people always go to war. So much passion, so little time. Like butterflies, flying on the sigh of summer.”

Maybe it’s time for Jaskier to write the song he owes to Filavendrel.

Jaskier sleeps in the ruined mayor’s house while Geralt sleeps with his cock still wet from a witch. But Geralt, thoroughly refreshed, wakes him gently and they steal (literally) from the house, grabbing potions and supplies and food and wine and fleeing Rinde, Chaos nipping their heels. Geralt laughs afterwards. Jaskier tries not to feel jealous, tries not to covet the sound too close to his heart.

“Next time you’re out of your mind in need of a fuck, please do us both the favor and take me instead. You’re the least resourceful Witcher in the world, Geralt.”

“What a noble sacrifice,” Geralt jokes, dry as tinder. But that night, they are under the stars, and Geralt tucks Jaskier’s head beneath his chin as they sleep and whispers, “I couldn’t, Jaskier,” apropos of nothing and everything, an apology for years of yearning. Jaskier does a terrible job pretending to be asleep. Geralt does a better job letting him pretend. Pretends he does not smell salt or hear a strange beautiful kind of crying that’s barely sound at all, more like an impression of sadness that makes his own eyes and chest burn. He does not think to touch the medallion sleeping at his throat.

Jaskier is sixty-six when his heart breaks and keeps beating. He remembers this.

He is still sixty-six when a royal courrier drops a letter in front of him, Geralt glaring at the Cintran seal.

“I’m to play at Princess Cirilia’s birthday.”

He is newly sixty-seven when Queen Calanthe asks him how his travels go. He is older than she, but she’ll never know. And he will never know the grief she carries to not even be able to bury her only child.He tells her Geralt has no desire to take her granddaughter from her - oh yes and his travels are quite lovely. She does not stop him from singing of Geralt and calling him noble and champion and hero and true. He should be old enough not to wallow in heart ache; maybe he hasn’t grown up at all.

Geralt waits for him outside of Cintra. He does not ask after the princess. He does not ask him for the five years that follow, when Jaskier is asked to return for Ciri’s birthday each year. Jaskier wishes he knew his restraint. He cannot help himself when he asks if Geralt has seen a certain purple-eyed mage. Jaskier already knows the answer. Geralt is fractured each time. He comes back hips swaggering and pissy like a wet cat. That’s when Jaskier isn’t there to see the witch herself.

When he is there … Yennefer tips her head as Jaskier and looks at him.

He is sixty-eight. He has been at Geralt’s side almost every year for the past twenty years.

“You are a dedicated...creature, aren’t you, Jaskier. What did Geralt do to deserve that, I wonder,” and she really wonders, lip curling a little, eyes a bright clean razor’s edge that flays Jaskier open. She scares him, but she’ll never touch him. Geralt might not kiss Jaskier in the dark anymore, but Jaskier knows Geralt would never let anyone hurt him. Sometimes, Yennefer lingers with them and the three of them share a meal, exchanging parcels of information. Geralt always comes back to him in the morning.

He is seventy, holding Yennefer of Vengerberg’s hand as she coughs up blood and bile. Triss Merigold and Geralt are portal hopping, after some monster with some cure for the overdose of whatever poison-spell-whothefuckknows Yennefer took. It’s a mess. He doesn’t understand, but Yennefer is crushing his hand and cursing her way into every possible hell there is. She coughs and spits blood onto Jaskier’s face with a lurch of pain.

“Sorry,” she mutters, eyes screwed shut. Jaskier scrubs a hand across his face, tasting her death on the tip of his tongue.

“I think for once you didn’t mean it,” he jokes, shuffling behind her and propping her against his chest.

“Just this once, bard,” she manages because Yennefer will always get the last word in. He admires this about her.

Triss Merigold had stepped in front of Geralt and Jaskier, bloody - Jaskier knows Geralt has a life before him, secrets and stories Jaskier wants to spend forever learning - but he hadn’t known Geralt to look frantic for a woman who wasn’t Yennefer.

He said, “Triss,” already running like a hook in his gut reeled him to her.

“Yennefer’s dying, Geralt,” because fuck, isn’t that the life they lead, and then Jaskier is throwing himself through the portal behind them, forgotten, crashing into a bedroom that smells acrid with metals, the air crackling in his hair, static shock with every touch.

Triss knows how to stop the hemorrhaging inside of Yennefer, but needs a cockatrice heart.

“Jaskier, take care of Yen,” Geralt orders, begs, he isn’t sure. Geralt kneels beside Yennefer, face a wide blank of fear that Jaskier has never seen before, hands hovering because he doesn’t know how to heal, only hurt. (If he could remember how Geralt had looked in the desert, after the Arachanae, he would be more familiar with what Geralt of Rivia looks like when he thinks someone he loves is dying.) Then his jaw jumps and he leaves Jaskier with the last woman on earth that he wants to save.

So he is seventy, watching something roil in Yennefer’s abdomen. She screams and scratches at her skin, fine-tipped nails drawing blood.

“Oh no, no, no, what is - what the hell is that! -,” he thinks he sees a hand, a something, press at her from the inside. She gasps, a wet stangled sound, her cry of pain young and scared, a girl screaming, not a witch, and then she bites at the air and clenches around whatever’s ripping its way through her. “My baby,” she screams, curling into a ball, fetal herself.

“Your what?” and Jaskier knows mages are infertile, just like Witchers. But has a Witcher ever fucked a mage? Is it possible mutagen and Chaos can breed? Is it - is it Geralt’s? He swallows the lurch of his stomach, the upheavel of his heart.

He hugs her, pinning her arms to her sides before she can claw her way into her womb.

“Jaskier,” she pleads. “Fuck. Get me a knife. Cut it out, Jaskier. Cut it out. Give me a knife.” Her hand becomes a claw and Jaskier falls back in pain as she twists him in pain alongside her, while she gropes in her own mess to find something sharp. He tastes her blood in his mouth.

“Fuck off,” he screams at her. He’s not like Pavetta. No one goes flying. But Yennefer releases her hold on him and he scoops her back into his lap and rocks her to a lullaby, a song he can’t remember, sweet like field grass, just as he did with Geralt once upon a time. She stares up at him, sweat matting her hair to her forehead, quiet for the first time. The absence of her screaming makes his ears ring.

When Triss and Geralt reappear, he is still singing, stroking her hair. Yennefer lays in a pool of dark clotted blood; Jaskier had watched something slither from betwixt her legs, too many limbs, furry, a deer and a parrot and a clump of dirt.

Changeling children.

Geralt doesn’t touch either of them, stands dumb and as lost as any man. Then he sets water to a boil in the firepit of the room to make clean bandages while Triss slides up Yennefer’s dress, grim and knowing.

No one talks about it. But they stay in the backwater town for two days until Yennefer wakes up. Geralt leaves her room again a snarling knot of himself, angry and heaving. “She wants to talk to you,” he tells Jaskier, storming out of the small house they’re holed up in. Probably to go kill something.

Yennefer pins him with her purple eyes as soon as the door closes behind him. Jaskier fidgets.

“I have elven blood,” she says, smiling faintly, losing the smile, looking at her hands. Her nails are broken. He isn’t sure what that’s supposed to mean. He never knows what she means.

“Was that Geralt’s baby,” is how Jaskier replies. She flinches, a harsh breath making her nostrils flair.

“No,” she scoffs, like he’s stupid. He might be. He’s pretty sure all three of them are a three-headed chicken pecking each other to death, not seeing that they’ll all die once the blood starts to flow. “Would you have wanted it to be?”

“No.” He hopes to goddess Geralt does not think it was a baby, was not another pain born from him.

He does not talk about children with Geralt. Geralt is soft to them, as all decent men are. Jaskier does not talk to him about mothers and fathers, not since that night years ago in Oxenfurt. He knows how Witcher boys are made, where they come from. Geralt told him. Being drowned like a kitten in a pail.

“Do you know why mages are infertile - rather, how?” She throws it at him, rolling her eyes at his wide-armed shrug. “The transformation we take, to cease aging, to give us our ideal. They take our organs, ovaries and wombs, hollow us out - so much harder for girls, isn’t it, it’s always so much harder for girls. They burn it to ash and we are born in our own blood.”

“Then what was….that?”

“Another dead end.” She doesn’t elaborate. “Tell me, Jaskier. What did you trade for your immortality? I know you’ve still got balls hanging between your legs.”

Jaskier regards himself in her mirror. “I’m not sure yet.”

Geralt asks about princess Cirilia, after, after Triss returns them to the road they’d been before, on their way to the next contract. Jaskier does his best to remember everything the little princess has ever said to him. That she likes to dance and struggles to sit still and is the spitting image of Pavetta. It’s the last time he asks too.

Jaskier is seventy two. He doesn’t believe in dragons until Geralt tells him otherwise.

Yennefer comments on crow’s feet that they both know aren’t there. Then they both look at Geralt who is petting Roach, studiously pretending this isn’t happening. Yennefer squints at Jaskier, narrows her eyes at Geralt, squints more at Jaskier.

“He has yet to realize,” Jaskier says. Yennefer rolls her eyes hard enough her head rolls with the gesture.

Geralt eyes them both warily, sure they’re devising a cantrip against him.

Geralt hangs three more lives he couldn’t save on himself. Twenty-two years of watching Geralt grow guiltier. Has anything changed since that day in Dol Blathanna - has it been twenty two more years of walking around bloody and hating himself, never able to find a better choice than the lesser evil?

Jaskier wants to take him away from it all. He thinks he could, if Geralt let him. “Just trying to work out what pleases me.”

It’s the same as when he’s sixty-six.

“Jaskier. I can’t.”

“I know.” He smiles and plucks at a swaying weed, blows a hundred seeds over the cliff’s edge, watches them drift away as Geralt goes to Yennefer.

Who knew a wolf could kill so gently. Who knew you could die as softly as a seed in the breeze.

He is seventy-two, devoured and dying. He walks down the mountain, vaguely following the dwarves. Doesn’t he have enough stories for a lifetime? For two? He calls on every noble he knows, every classmate who admired Julian Alfred Pankratz. He travels to Oxenfurt in near-leisure, famous in his own right. He claims an honorary position at Oxenfurt as Jaskier, a signet ring from 1210 on his finger.

He forgets himself. Within a month, someone accuses him of lying about his travels. He could not have been beside Geralt of Rivia for twenty-some-odd years.

He could kill himself again. He could throw himself another funeral. Dig another empty grave. Maybe this time, he’ll climb in. He’ll lay down in the dirt. He’ll build a pyre and use one hundred pages of music no one else can read as his tinder.

It might not kill him.

Worse. It might.

And then he will be another dead name Geralt will carry around. Another evil.

He does none of that. He leaves Oxenfurt and buys a horse, taking the long way home to Lettenhove. He has many flowers to pick for his mother’s grave. Maybe he will lay one on his own.

He is seventy-two, living in a cottage near the coast, working out what pleases him. HIs bedroom is plastered with a hundred pages of music only he can read. His arm aches with strumming. His hand spasms, cramps. His voice vanishes on him most days, somewhere into the fiftieth page. He’ll play another concert. He can think of no other way through than this. This Endless Concert must end. He’ll play his way out. He’ll sing himself into the grave if he must. He’ll burn out his own heart with trying if only to make it hurt less.

He is seventy-three when he follows his feet through the woods, fifty years to the day that he pulled a book from the Oxenfurt shelves and never put it back. He sings ripples into lakes, makes the bower above him shiver, leaves warm leather in a sunbeam. His feet do all the walking. They always had a way of leading him home.

Geralt sees him, or hears him, first. He’s sitting on his ass, head in his hands. When Jaskier stumbles through a honeysuckle bush, fingers sticky with nectar, yellow pollen in his hair, Geralt takes one shocked step his way.  
“Jaskier!” Then: “fuck.”

“Oh hello to you too,” Jaskier says, hands on his hips. He could vomit. He might vomit. Would that be too dramatic? He’s spent the past year contemplating his second suicide, both metaphorical and real; he does not need a surly Witcher to lend a hand.

“Run,” Geralt says, turning in a circle.

“Ah, what the hell did I just walk into,” Jaskier groans, pressing his bloody fingertips to his temple. “Ger--”

“No!” Geralt snaps at him, hand outstretched. “Stop talking. You need to go.”

“You’re - you’re trespassing,” Jaskier shoots, waving his hand. “I bought this land ages ago.”

“I know,” Geralt says with a wrinkle and a frown. “Well, your father did-”

“My father didn’t do shit all. Goddess forgive me, I love you but you are dumber than a bag of hammers, Ger-”

“Shut up!” Geralt shouts again.

“Oi! Fuck you!” Jasker throws up his hands, marching towards Geralt. He’ll break his hand on his face if he has to, welcomes it in fact. Geralt shoves him back, hard, Jaskier pinwheeling for balance and still falling.

“Fuck.” Geralt’s staring past him, stone-faced and resigned. The hair on Jaskier’s neck lifts, adrenaline throbbing in the sharp beat of his heart at whatever has Geralt looking battle-ready.

Jaskier looks over his shoulder and makes a face.

“Vivido?”

His old tutor comes through the same honeysuckle thicket and extends a hand.

“Hello, Julian, it’s been some time. Thirty years? Fifty? I’m never any good at keeping track.”

“Thirty, I think. No. Less than? Wow,” Jaskier whistles. “I have been drinking and brooding way too much if I’m losing count. Must have taken after my poor company.” He shoots a scathing look at Geralt.

Geralt looks. Lost. Very lost. His head is cock, and the wolf is a dog, yellow eyes searching Jaskier’s.

“Who are you,” he demands.

“Didn’t you just hear Julian--” Vivido starts to explain, a flourish of his hand to his breast.

“No,” Geralt growls. He points at Jaskier, murder a curl in his mouth. “Who. Are. You.”

“Uhhhhhhh.”

“What are you? What did you do to my friend?”

Jaskier throws his head back and laughs, high and hyena. “Oh, now I’m your friend. I thought I was the person shovelling shit onto your whole Witcher life, forcing you to do things like have feelings and fall in love and accidentally adopt the heirs to thrones. Get fucked, Geralt.”

“Stop,” Geralt winces, slitting his eyes at Vivido. He mouths the name. Vivido. Then he says it. “Vivido,” and tries to take a step. His foot lifts, then it comes back down. He growls, turning in a circle, pacing once around like a caged beast. “Fuck.”

“Uh -” Jaskier tries again. “Are you -”

“He’s a bit inconvenienced,” Vivido says gently, a false sigh in his mouth.

“Huh?” Jaskier tries one last time. Geralt roars and turns to him, coming up short.

“He’s a fae, you imbecile. You must be my bard if you’re this thick-headed. How you never died all those years astounds me.”

Jaskier bites his lip, looks down. It shouldn’t hurt. It shouldn’t be possible for it to hurt all over again. He looks down, eyes following the perfect ring of dandelions Geralt’s caged within. He laughs even as his stomach swims up the back of his throat.

“Lovely,” Jaskier acknowledges. “That’s just - that is just,” he spins a slow marveling circle, arms lifted like a composing, head thrown back, the sun warm on his face, “That explains so fucking much! You’re right, Geralt-”

“What part of fae don’t you -”

“I am thick-headed!” Jaskier cuts him off. “Fae. All this time,” Jaskier whirls on Vivido. Evidently not his name, or not his whole name. “You!” Jaskier prods him in the chest. Vivido almost looks flattered. “You fucked my mother!”

Geralt, his stomach doing the opposite of Jaskier’s and instead plummeting as a realization he should die having not seen years ago finally sinks in, tilts his head back to the sky and asks a low dry: “Why? Why me?” One would think Destiny could only place so much burden on one man, Witcher or not.

“Seriously, Geralt,” Jaskier turns to his Witcher - his Witcher always, he’ll admit that to himself - it is a day of truths - “I know you’re rubbish with humans but look at me! I have looked like this for almost fifty years!”

“You played the Endless Concert,” Geralt tsks, a moue softening his mouth. He smiles, that same gutting soft smile he so rarely wounds Jaskier with, and shakes his head. “The most famous musician in the world, all this time, my humble bard. A child of Fae.”

“Not that you ever appreciated it,” Jaskier sniffs, crossing his arms across his chest, holding his ribcage shut against the wild escape of his heart.

“But here I am.”

Jaskier stares at him. Geralt doesn’t look away. There’s nothing left of him that Geralt has not taken. His heart has long since fled his chest, hasn’t it. Years ago.

“Julian,” Vivido breaks in, clearing his throat gently, “I’d like to clarify that I am not your father.”

Jaskier’s stunned little smile falls. “You’re not? But you and my mother...”

“I didn’t meet her until after you were born. It was your singing as a baby that drew me to your house to initially. After that--”

“Alright,” Jaskier throws up his hands, one to silence the Fae, one to silence the Witcher. “Enough. Fae. Got it, very good, fantastic news. Would have appreciated knowing that during my first existential crisis, spared myself a lot of sleepless nights. Him,” Jaskier jabs a finger at Geralt. Then at the faerie ring. “Let him go.”

Vivido smiles a mouth like a sutured wound. “What do I get in return? A Witcher is rarer than rare to have in a faerie ring.”

A Witcher is rarer than rare to have in a faerie ring. Who can deny that? And what does Jaskier have worth more than Geralt? A hundred pages of music only he can read? If Vivido wanted that, he could have taken it any time, surely. A Witcher in a faerie ring, imporobably impossibly rare.

Rarer still that it’s a mile from Jaskier’s cottage.

Rarer still that he’s here today, for Jaskier to walk upon. Feet that have always lead him to Geralt year after year after year. All he’d done was follow a path through the fields, each time.

“Do you remember what my mother told me I smelled like,” Jaskier asks, to Vivido, to himself. To Destiny and Geralt and his own stupidity. “Dandelions.”

He bends and plucks one, white milk on his thumb. He drops to his knees, glances up at Geralt, and plucks another. And another. He’s been singing the same song for fifty years. As he plucks the weeds, they turn in his hand, petals curling inward, turning to seed, lifting in the breeze that stirs as he sings like sea foam, speckling themselves into the air like blood flung from a taut gut string. They fall back into place in the grass around Geralt and spring green and bright and yellow anew.

He plucks and plucks. He crawls on his knees into the night, into the dawn, into the sun burning his neck. He shoves the dandelions in his pockets, down his pants, in his shirt. He swallows their bitter heads, coughing up petals and seeds and swallows them again. His eyes water with sap, it drips from his lips. An Endless Circle. But he’s been here before.

The last one is already a ball of cloud, stiff and tall between Geralt’s feet. Jaskier kneels low against the ground and blows with all his might. Geralt stumbles backwards, falling from a ring that no longer grows. Jaskier sends the seeds across the world to bloom for him a hundred times and a hundred times more.

He doesn’t have his voice again, kneeling mute in the grass. Geralt crawls to him, says his name, over and over: Jaskier. Dandelion. Then he’s afloat, dreaming, his mouth full of cotton, his head too. Geralt carries him home, the path laiden with every flower he’s ever seen. Jaskier smells like a bouquet when he tucks him into bed, lays down beside him even though the smell makes his head hurt. He deserves a little hurt.

Jaskier wakes coughing. He turns over the side of the bed to spit dirt, dark as pitch, onto his floor. A familiar hand rubs his back through it. He’s glad he never took himself up on his own threat to crawl into a grave. Grit in his teeth, he flops back into the sweat outline of his sleep.

“Better?” Geralt asks mildly.

Jaskier groans and swats blindly at him. Geralt catches his hand and kisses the inside of his wrist.

“Don’t,” Jaskier whimpers, too desperate and greedy to pull away. “I am weak, my love, and I am wanting.”

Geralt kisses his wrist again, then his scarred fingertips, each one.

“And I am sorry,” Geralt says with another press of his lips. “For all the things I said, and did and did not do. Jaskier, forgive me.”

“Geralt,” he croaks, hating him as he lets Geralt keep his hand and bathe it in pleading soft kisses. That’s all it’s ever been. His begging mouth, him kneeling at Geralt’s feet. Him choking on things he never said. “Please. I love you.”

Geralt makes that same woosh of sound he did over ten years ago. He curls over Jaskier and kisses his eyelids, tongue flicking out against tear-matted lashes. “I love you, and it terrifies me,” Geralt says while he’s brave. “I have to make sure you’re safe.” That’s All he’s tried to do. A gentle touch and rough fingertips. He brushes Jaskier’s hair from his face, strokes a cherubic cheek, perhaps unlined by age but no less destructible. “I came to take you to Kaer Mohren.”

“What?” Jaskier sniffles, finally opening his eyes. Geralt’s tenderness is matched by the hard worry of a man who has seen too many wars. Geralt doesn’t seem to age but the years wear on him. If Jaskier doesn’t get cut down, one day maybe he will look like that too.

“Nilfgaard is marching towards Cintra. I’m getting Ciri and I’m taking her with me to Kaer Mohren. You will be safe there with us.”

This is it then. “I’ll go with you.”

Geralt shakes his head, strokes his cheek. “No. Listen to me, this once.”

“You have enormous balls to demand anything of me,” Jaskier protests. He’s been conscious no more than ten minutes and already petulant and impossible. “I’m Fae.”

Geralt laughs. He knows now why his heart was always hot around Jaskier, his medallion slowly burning through him in a warning he will never heed. He kisses Jaskier, lips he would die for. Lips that have sung him back to life more times than he probably knows.

“I know, I’m not demanding. I’m here to beg, Jaskier. Please, meet me at Rakveralin. Leave tomorrow, if you can. I will barely make it in time to Cintra before Nilfgaard is upon the city. I want you as far -- I’m begging you -- be as far away from the fighting as possible. Heed me, this once, Jaskier.”

“You’ll find me in Rakveralin?”

Geralt nods. “I’ve sent word to my brothers and Vessemir of you. One of them will be at the base of the mountain. If I’m not there by the second month’s end, follow your Fae feet to them.”

He doesn't say, my feet have always led me to you and only you. He says: “Only because you begged.”

He beats the war. He’s ahead of it, but news travels faster than he does, Fae feet or no. Cintra is lost. Jaskier knew those halls, those markets, those people. There are only so many memorials he can write. He doesn’t hear about a Witcher among the bodies. He doesn’t feel it in his heart either. He waits in Rakveralin. On the last day of the second month, he plucks a yellow weed from the frozen earth.

He never was good at listening to Geralt. He starts walking back from whence he traveled. His life has taken no wrong turns yet.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * A [Restricted Work] by [hsu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hsu/pseuds/hsu) Log in to view. 




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